pre-JellyBean:swipe animation queues all 30 frames of the swipe animation, does NOT drop any, and struggles to complete them all, taking 4 seconds to walk the queue with as many skips and pops as expected. Video Player fail.

JellyBean:swipe animation probably does not queue 30 frames of animation, but ALSO gets PRIORITY to COMPLETE them first in the allotted 1 second. Video Player success

Real-world example, keyboard response -- which is more responsive?: the console that reacts instantly to your key-presses even under a load of 24.00 on a single-processor, or a console that gets back to you after it's done processing some background tasks. The former is "actually" and "feels" more responsive, while the later will run the bg-tasks slightly faster.

Ah, young idealism, trying to be the Debian. I was there, once. It is true that it's better to have open-source drivers, but you need a stable, open, documented hardware platform. PCs are, Android is neither.

You will spend your entire life rebuilding "plumbing" after which the hardware you've built it for is long dead while its descendents -- you cannot support. A life where you didn't actually build anything useful, the next iPhone nor next game-changing piece of software-engineering, but just ran in a mouse-wheel.

Reality is we just have to bend-over a little and suck up buying new hardware; accept the respective new binary blobs. Just try to stay above it. CyanogenMod is doing a good job there.